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The State and Women in Modern Japan: Feminist Discourses in the Meiji and Taish¯ Eras'

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The State and Women in Modern Japan: Feminist Discourses in the Meiji and Taish¯ Eras' Santa Clara University Scholar Commons History College of Arts & Sciences 3-1999 The tS ate and Women in Modern Japan: Feminist Discourses in the Meiji and Taisho Eras Barbara Molony Santa Clara University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarcommons.scu.edu/history Part of the Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons, and the History Commons Recommended Citation Molony, B. (1999). The tS ate and Women in Modern Japan: Feminist Discourses in the Meiji and Taisho Eras. In J. Hunter (Ed.) Japan: State and People in the Twentieth Century. London: London School of Economics. Papers Presented at the STICERD 20th Anniversary Symposium - July 1998 © by the authors. All rights reserved. Short sections of text, not to exceed two paragraphs, may be quoted without explicit permission provided that full credit, including © notice, is given to the source. This Book Chapter is brought to you for free and open access by the College of Arts & Sciences at Scholar Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in History by an authorized administrator of Scholar Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. State and Women in Modern Japan: Feminist Discourses in the Meiji and Taish¯ Eras Barbara Molony The relationship of women to the Japanese state has been the object of much discussion in Japanese studies in recent years. To be sure, there are as many ways to approach this topic as there are conceptions of ‘the state’ and of ’women.’ Both of these terms are embedded in complicated and historically contingent discourse fields, making it impossible to posit just one or two types of relationships linking the two categories, as they are not fixed. Some scholars look at women as the target of government policies;1 some examine women as agents of some part of the state;2 some are interested in women in organized or institutionalized politics or movements;3 some study women in groups that articulate with state power;4 and others look at the discourses about women and the state.5 This study considers one aspect of this last approach, examining the relationship of women and the state through discourses on ‘women’s rights’ from the mid-Meiji era through the Taish¯ era. Many scholars have grounded their work on the assumption that the ‘state’ was an entity distinct from women or women’s groups, with which women sought alliance to achieve shared goals, against which they struggled for justice, or in which they sought membership.6 While a stress on resistance or on accommodation appears to be making vastly different points of view about women’s relationship to the state, they do, in fact, share an assumption that the state had an a priori existence with which women could articulate, but not really change. Bringing the question of rights into the picture, however, muddies the waters considerably, because possession of rights assumes a degree of ownership of the state and thus the ability to influence it. Women’s rights discussions are particularly germane to an understanding of the ideology of the state in any society, and Japan is no exception. The struggle for women’s rights, while overlooked by many historians in the past, has in more recent years captured the imagination of other historians as an 21 inspirational instance of resistance against the state. At the same time, however, the notion of resistance must be understood in relation to its converse--that is, resistance is always articulated in relationship to power.7 Rights both embrace and resist power. ‘Rights’ remained a central issue in a wide variety of Japanese intellectual and political discourses, including feminist discourses, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.8 But the notion of rights underwent change by the interwar period, as Japanese people’s understanding of the ‘state’ changed. By then, the state had come to appear as a reified entity, essentially a bureaucracy with legislative and other appurtenances shaping it, under an abstraction (the emperor) theorized as defined by and defining the collective spirit of the kokumin. Ironically, the era of greater democracy and liberalism was also one in which the contours of the state were already more established, so women’s struggles for the right of inclusion in the state would potentially produce more gradual change even if women gained an institutionalized political voice. In addition to struggling for the right to participate in the state, either in such formal ways as access to suffrage and political office or in less formal ways such as state recognition of the ‘voice’ of the ‘kitchen’, feminists also defined women’s rights in the interwar period to include the notion of ‘protection’ by a state whose prior existence they acknowledged. That is, in addition to working to be included in the state in order to alter its constitution in ways beneficial to women and families, feminists sought the state’s protection from certain aspects of public and private society which they viewed as oppressive. In the interwar period, these included, but were not restricted to, demands for protection from institutionalized patriarchy--both state supported patriarchy and the everyday version of domineering husbands; protection from the excesses of capitalism; and protection from miserable economic conditions that led to suffering and deaths of women and their children. Both forms of rights discussions in the interwar era- -resistance against participatory exclusion and acceptance of the state’s power to protect--assumed an existing state structure. Meiji-era discussions of rights assumed both a more fluid political situation and a less precise definition of rights. Meiji-era rights discourse In Japan as in many other societies, ‘rights’ had multiple meanings.9 Rights discourse 22 was lively and diverse, particularly because it originally surfaced in a variety of contexts, and blended notions of Tokugawa anti-authoritarianism10 with frequently conflated ‘Western’ rights discourses. In addition, the terms for ‘rights’ (kenri), ‘women's rights’ (joken), ‘male-female equality’ (danjo by¯d¯), ‘male-female equal rights’ (danjo d¯ken), and other concepts in the lexicon of rights were themselves neologisms. (These terms were, at times, used interchangeably, though their meanings were actually distinct.)11 Moreover, state, nation, nationality, ethnicity, gender, and so on were all in the process of mutual construction around the same time, and in some cases, rights discourse was used selectively to resist the emerging structure of one or another of these categories. Conversely, rights discourse could also be employed to help reify any of these categories or institutions. People's Rights advocate Ueki Emori notwithstanding, however--Ueki claimed that men and women were entitled to equal rights and that resistance to unresponsive government was a people's right and duty--most Meiji-era advocates for women did not call for resistance to the state or society leading to its overthrow and replacement by a rights-paradise for women.12 ‘Resistance’ occurred within the regimes of power it called into question.13 To put it a bit more simply, until the rise of socialist feminism in the last decade of the Meiji period, women's rights called for inclusion, not revolution--and even most socialists sought inclusion in the absence of a revolution.14 I suggest two reasons for feminists’ desire for inclusion: first, the fundamental nature of rights themselves; and second, the identification, for some Meiji-era women's advocates, of rights with recognition and rewarding of female self-cultivation as a marker of a woman's personhood. Rights discussions in the late Meiji era, whether by advocates for men or women, developed in a context of iconoclastic rejection of past (Tokugawa) relations of power and of engagement with foreign ideas. That power (a state, social norms, laws, customs, and so on) would exist was not questioned; it was a given. One's relationship to power was under discussion. Feminisms have often been about--as feminist theorist Wendy Brown notes—‘a longing to share in power rather than be protected from its excesses.’15 23 Any quest for rights, then, might seem rather ironic. One of the purposes of rights is protection from something--from encroachment by another public person, from encroachment by the state, from being limited in one's expression, and so on. (The various notions of rights are frequently in conflict--one's freedom of expression, for example, might conflict with another's right to protection.) These notions of rights as protection from encroachment were clearly shared by some Meiji rights advocates; but to what extent were they applied to women? I would argue that the idea of rights as protection from the state was a minor thread in women's rights talk--that the main focus was on inclusion in the state and equality in both the private domain of the family and the public domain of civil society.16 Admittedly, a ‘public/private’ dichotomy does not quite work here, where women sought to empower themselves in the family (‘private’) through means of the law (‘public’) and through public recognition of their intellectual accomplishments. The notion of protection was not absent from Meiji discourse but it arose more in connection with the idea of ‘liberation’(kaih¯) than with rights. Liberation was not used in discussing women's political rights until Socialists began using the term in 1907. Kaih¯ was first used to discuss the liberation of prostituted women and girls from contractual bondage and came to include, by the end of the century, liberation of wives, through divorce, from oppressive marriages.17 Protection, which came to occupy a central place in women’s rights discussions in the twentieth century, was simply the fortunate outcome of women’s struggle for respect, the dominant Meiji-era feminist focus.
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